


Love and Honour(ifics)

by 3minswriting



Category: NU'EST
Genre: Fluff, M/M, baekron, baekron is worth it tho, bottom dongho, its never meant to have a plot and yet somehow i just..., school/university au, shameless hyung aron and blond mohawk baekho feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:49:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25128781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3minswriting/pseuds/3minswriting
Summary: Before Aron moved to Seoul, he'd never quite understood what was the big deal with honorfics.Then Dongho calls him 'hyung'.
Relationships: Kang Dongho | Baekho/Aaron Kwak | Aron
Comments: 28
Kudos: 46





	Love and Honour(ifics)

**Author's Note:**

> welp if baekron are jobless ig we gotta put them to hard work in the tags. 
> 
> speaking of jobless - there's only two people i'd come out of hiatus for, and this fic is for both of them. 
> 
> ily baekho. ily aron.  
> 
> 
> jokes lol. there's three, actually.
> 
> this is for you.
> 
> 28.

_"Hyung! Hyung_ please _slow down!"_

The high squeak snapping off the end of the last syllable is what catches Aron’s attention, more than the heavy breathing or the tense fingers digging into his back. 

Before moving to Seoul on exchange, Aron had never been much for the honorifics and the deference to ‘elders’ that was so prevalent in South Korea. Back at home in L.A., most people were laid back - maybe a little rude sometimes, but it didn’t bother him either - it was nicer, he felt, to know where he stood with someone and have them be comfortable with him than need to hide behind a polite facade and terms that constantly reminded him of social and cultural distance. It was a huge divide, more than he’d anticipated. 

He’d had fantasies, actually, of coming here to complete his final years of high school, acing his university entrance exams and then be spoiled for choice between the offers from Ivy Leagues and SNU. Aron thought he would pick up the language easily too - immersion and all that - and make lots of friends, be the popular foreign kid whose alienness was circumvented by his shared ethnic heritage and mad skills and smarts.

A lot of fantasies that came half true, if he was being honest.

SNU was an excellent university and he was enjoying his courses so far since starting in September. Aron wasn’t following the exact path his parents had envisioned for him and made it somewhat a journey of his own, but they were proud of him. They supported his journalism dreams and were more than overjoyed at how he’d taken up sustainable resource engineering as a double (‘Much more practical’ ‘You’ll get a job for certain that way’ they’d approved, though his younger brother waited until their parents left the zoom call before he’d pointed out, ‘You never cared about science before, and engineering? Since when did you care about having a guaranteed career?’, to which Aron had laughed and shrugged him off, saying he’d understand when he was older).

He didn’t pick up the language half as easily as he had hoped. Aron had been smart, always talented with language and expressing himself, but Korean - the alphabet? Fine. Easy. Nailed it. His handwriting was better than most of his born-and-raised classmates.

Speaking it? Trying to explain his thoughts in it? 

Most days, he struggled to string a proper sentence together. 

And as for friends? 

He made a few, a good core group in his final years of high school. Most of them were exchange students too - Americans, Canadians, and Chinese - whom he could speak english with whenever he wanted.

His local classmates though, presented a different problem. They didn’t like him. They didn’t want to speak with him. 

“They’re probably just a little scared of you because you’re different to what they’re used to.” Eric had suggested.

“Try talking to a few in Korean.” Kevin agreed, then added, “quietly.”

“Me? Scary?” The idea was just too foreign - more foreign than he was in this country - and Aron couldn’t believe it. 

He was far from a jock type - the guy looking back at him in the mirror each morning when he brushed his teeth was hardly the kind that Aron could see others considering as ‘intimidating’. He wasn’t tall, he was pretty skinny, and sports was his least favourite subject. Give him a book, a play, a stage, anything like that and Aron would dominate. A soccer ball? A kumdo? He’d be so far out the door he’d practically be back in California. No one could think _he_ was scary.

“I’ve _tried_. They don’t wanna talk to me.” Aron had complained, leaning back on his chair in the school library.

“Have you joined a club? Or maybe try tutoring.” Amber grinned. “Then they can’t run away from you.”

Aron was talented in a lot of subjects but unsurprisingly, it was his English tutoring sessions that took off with the other students. It started out as small groups of his classmates hanging out after English lessons were over to circle his desk, notebooks at the ready and only one person brave enough to ask the questions everyone wanted to know the answers to.

It felt good, teaching. It also felt nice to have same-age friends from school who weren’t outcasts exchangers like him.

The exchange fantasy checklist was becoming a reality. 

There was just one thing missing. 

When Aron had packed his bags and said goodbye to his friends in L.A., they’d all teased him, asking if he was planning to score and maybe finally get a girlfriend while he was there.

His type didn’t really change when he moved even though what he liked was far more easy to find in Cali than it would be in South Korea. Aron liked blondes. He liked curvy, big blondes, whether they were pale or tanned or dark didn’t matter; as long as they had enough to fill his hands and they were cute, Aron was weak, ready, and willing. 

The tutoring gig wasn’t just out of Aron’s kind heart (he was kind, but he wasn’t blind and he was definitely horny) - it was a great way to meet people too.

“ _Ah..are you..Kwak-sshi?”_

Dongho had been incredibly different to the other students that Aron had met. His junior by two years yet already taller and bigger, with a body that looked more like it would be better used in football practice than clammed up in a library booth with a pile of books around, he couldn’t deny it - Dongho was hardly the kind of student Aron wanted to be abruptly met with when he was trying to study.  
  


He was fucking _scary_.

That first afternoon, Aron had been trying to figure out who he had wronged at school to have this huge bully sicced onto him.

“ _Who’s asking?”_ He’d asked the brown-haired student standing in front of him with a frown. Kept his eyes on his new foe while trying to calculate which was the closest emergency exit and how many witnesses he could summon if he needed to sue this guy’s family for his hospital bills.

“ _Oh, I’m sorry!”_ The frowning facade disappeared momentarily as the student bowed awkwardly, book bag strap spilling off his shoulder which he hastily grabbed at. “ _I’m Kang Dongho, from 10-B. Nice to meet you.”_

“Yeah..” Aron had still thought it was a trick of some type, eyes darting back and forth to locate exits four and six before answering in korean. “ _Nice to meet you. Can I...help you with something, Kang-sshi?”_

He had had no idea that by uttering those innocent words, his last year of high school would be changed forever.

Because the moment Kang Dongho stood up upright and _beamed_ \- not just a tiny smile, not just breaking away that angry scowl, but straight up eye-crinkling, teeth showing, cheeks flushing, princess giggling _beamed_ at him _-_ Aron realised that this wasn’t a bully standing in front of him.

This was a whole _baby_. 

It’s the name that now drips somewhere between his parted lips and the sweat falling from his chin.

“ _You like that_ , baby?” Aron knows he does, he can feel how much Dongho likes it, but nothing is cuter to him than the way the other glows bright red when he uses that pet name.

For nearly two years they’d been nothing more than friends. It wasn’t even like Dongho was the only dongsaeng he tutored, or his favourite student - that was Minhyun because Minhyun always listened to his guidance and studied hard, unless Dongho joined their sessions. Then it was chaos of who was the bigger idiot and Aron had entrance exams to worry about, not who ate whose snacks (‘really’, Aron had scoffed when Dongho left their desk, ‘why do you tease him like that, you don’t even _eat_ rice puffs and you brought them’ and only received a foxy smirk in return) and whose pronunciation was more correct. In fact the only thing worse was when it was Dongho and Mingi - the two were incurably noisy and barely listened to a word he said. But Aron suffered through those sessions because both Minhyun and Mingi had a way of making the rather shy Dongho loosen up around him and laugh non-stop.

If it was just the two of them, him and Aron, Dongho was different. Aron hadn’t been blind to it - Dongho was quieter, fidgeted a lot more, and grew flustered whenever Aron corrected him. He was so eager for praise and to get things right that when he was scolded, Aron had expected him to blow up with a temper.

“ _Aron-hyung..”_ Instead, Dongho would whine and rest his head on Aron’s shoulder, or try to hold his wrist. “ _I’m sorry..can you please explain it again? I’m stupid, I can’t get it right..”_

“Y _ou’re not stupid.”_ Aron would tell him, giving up his wrist to be held and ignoring the fluttering in his stomach when the very big, very pretty brunette would sigh at him. “ _You just need to pay more attention to what I’m telling you.”_

_“I’m_ trying.”

“ _Then we’ll try again.”_

He had thought the reason for Dongho’s changed behaviour with him was because of their age difference. Aron was the senior, would always be Dongho’s senior, his _hyung_. Dongho was freer, bright and giggly with his same-age friends Minhyun and Mingi. 

With Aron, he held back on everything. He rarely tried playing around or joked during tutoring sessions, he wore his uniform more sloppily as if that made him look cooler when really, it reminded Aron more of an unruly puppy leaving its toys scattered around the house and he had no choice but to clean up after him - a chore of fixing ties and fingercombing brown hair that would have been annoying if Dongho weren’t so fucking _cute_ all the time. 

It was when Aron mentioned he was accepted into SNU and would be out of here in just a month that it finally began to click.

The way Dongho’s face fell.

The way Aron would find his hand suddenly full with another set of fingers trying to wriggle between his.

The way Dongho was suddenly ‘struggling’ with basic English vocabulary close to Aron’s graduation date and began texting a lot more often to ask for his help (‘ _Dongho, you know this why are you bothering me it’s nearly midnight.’ ‘sorry hyung.’_ Aron hadn’t needed to see the pout to know it was there; nor did he have to see the smile to hear it in Dongho’s voice the moment Aron called him thirty seconds after.)

As if that hadn’t been obvious enough, post-graduation seeing Dongho was even worse.

Aron’s unruly puppy turned up to visit him on campus after classes were over. Somehow in the span of six months, the long, shaggy-haired seventeen year-old Aron still texted despite being busy with university, had transformed into an eighteen-year-old he barely recognised. “Is _that_ your _dongsaeng_?” His friend Jonghyun had asked, “the one you were telling me about?”

“Y..yeah.” Aron wasn’t sure what was going to fall out first - his eyes or his tongue when he caught a glimpse of reality - or was it his final fantasy coming true, he didn’t know.

“He doesn’t..look like what I expected.” 

_Same_ , Aron almost said out loud, except no words formulated outside of the thoughts in his head when Dongho looked his way. 

The high cut fade and the cocky blond mohawk, with a peek of ( _holy shit,_ Aron felt his heart beat furiously in his chest, _is that a tattoo?)_ black ink under the standard white uniform shirt all seemed to belong to someone else.

Not his puppyish Dongho, who would look at him with wonderment as if he’d invented the english language and clung to his arm anytime Aron looked away.

Could those winged-eyeliner eyes ever look at him with the same kind of sweetness, he’d wondered. 

_"Hyung!”_ Dongho’s voice cracked with his big smile.

“Hey Dongho, you made it.” Aron found himself slipping accidentally into english, then when Dongho frowned he repeated the words in korean.

“ _I got a little lost, this place is so big...”_ Dongho’s frown stayed where it was, drifting to where Jonghyun stood.

“ _This is my friend Jonghyun, Jonghyun, this is Dongho.”_ Aron introduced the pair.

“ _Nice to meet you._ ” Dongho’s voice was a little shaky, nothing like Jonghyun’s calm reply.

“ _Nice to finally meet you too, Dongho-sshi. Aron-hyung talks about you all the time.”_

“ _He does?”_ Dongho’s eyes fluttered, looking back to Aron in surprise. 

“ _Not_ all _the time.”_ It was a mention or two at most..per hour. Aron was a reactive man; when he received a text he checked them, and when his friends asked who it was from to make him laugh and smile like that he was just honest.

“ _Uh, yeah hyung. All the time. You probably should stop texting him so much, Dongho-sshi.”_ Jonghyun continued as he looked between the pair. “ _Or he might become a bad student.”_

“ _He’s joking, Dongho._ ” Aron was quick to reassure the moment he noticed the tell-tale pout beginning to appear. It was a relief, actually, to see something so familiar on the otherwise strange apparition in front of him. He took Dongho’s wrist and was rewarded with another familiar reaction as Dongho’s pale cheeks began to redden. “ _I’m doing fine here, don’t worry. Let’s go, I’ll give you the tour. Maybe it’ll inspire you to study so you can come here too.”_

_“Here?”_

“ _Y_ _eah, you don’t want to?”_ Had things changed so much that Dongho’s goals were elsewhere? Aron had panicked, trying to recall if he’d noticed anything in their prior conversations to suggest his _dongsaeng_ had changed his goals from taking up a fine arts degree. He had hoped in the time that they’d been apart, Dongho hadn’t fallen into the trap of falling for it when told his future would be insecure in pursuing the arts. 

“ _N-no, if hyung is here, then I will try to come here too.”_

The sweet, earnest smile broken in between giggles reminded Aron of two years ago. Long afternoons spent in the library after classes of just the two of them or more, but always the soundtrack of Dongho’s laughter replaying in Aron’s mind as he worked through chapters of vocabulary and composition exercises.

But the time apart had seemed to change something between them. Aron couldn’t go back to sitting on his dorm bed and not look at and _see_ the tattooed, blond, rougher looking _dongsaeng_ sitting next to him without wondering what it was. 

What had changed? 

It was only the two of them, he’d realised, but Dongho was more skittish than ever. He looked so tough on the outside that Aron knew Jonghyun was probably telling their friends that the cutie _dongsaeng_ Aron spoke about was actually a hooligan by anyone’s standards.

“ _Dongho..what’s going on?”_

_“What do you mean, hyung?”_

_“This..”_ Aron gestured to the hair, the eyes, fingers helplessly flopping when he tried to point out the rest of Dongho’s body without specifically indicating how his friend had really filled out in all of the right places and it wasn’t a realisation Aron needed in his life if he wanted to keep his sanity. “ _You look..”_

_“You don’t like it?”_ Dongho ran his hand through his tufted locks, gaze on the ratty rug Aron’s roommate spilled spaghetti on last week.

_I like you. I love it._

It had too been dangerous to say those words out loud. 

But it felt like the gap between them was growing too great and Aron knew he had to do what he must-

he’d gotten into the exchange program

became one of the popular kids

entered into a prestigious university with top marks.

Now all that was missing was his pretty blonde - or at least that’s what it might have looked to any outsider who knew about his weaknesses and his fantasies before coming to make a future for himself in South Korea.

Dongho was more than a box to tick.

The young man next to him on the bed was - _is_ Aron’s precious _dongsaeng_.

He had never cared much for the seniority dynamic before. But it was that very same dynamic that kept the otherwise bubbly and gregarious Dongho quiet when he was at Aron’s side. It was the one that made his entire face go red when Aron initiated holding hands that afternoon in his tiny SCU dorm room, that made him wilt happily as Aron’s lips were pressed to his knuckles, then more were pressed to his blushing cheeks, finally to Dongho’s parted mouth and the pressing moved on from only being their connected lips to Dongho’s shoulders against the pillows with Aron’s body pinning him down. 

_“Hyung, hyung, hyung.”_

It is anything but honourable, what he does to Dongho beneath him now, yet the honorific made him feel like this was exactly what it was invented for:

to make his taller, larger, cuter underclassman make it clear to anyone listening that it wasn’t about size or strength or smarts that defined who was to be respected; it was experience. 

And judging from the jittering wails Dongho made as Aron thrusts deeper between his thighs, his experience is definitely keeping Dongho respectful. 

“ _Hyung-”_ Dongho’s voice warbles, broken apart from the mounting pressure that Aron chases too, coiling tighter in his core and threatening to tear him apart, _“it’s- too muchhh-”_

“ _You want me to take you slower_ baby?” Aron murmurs.

He knows the answer is no, Dongho’s just too shy to admit it. Aron likes that, though, and he speaks his praise in red fingerprints indenting Dongho’s jerking hips and in wet kisses that leave tattoos glistening as though freshly inked onto pale skin. Panting heats the air. They move as one. Aron keeps their pace, always does, because Dongho trusts him just like he did when they studied together, only now the praise Dongho is greedy for isn’t just his _hyung’s_ words and charming smile, but the hardness of Aron’s cock stretching him wide between his aching thighs. This is the compliment that he wants: that _he_ is the only one capable of making his _hyung_ this hard that Aron’s practically ready to explode inside him. All their foreplay, with Aron’s mouth filled with pert nipples and Dongho’s hands tugging on his _hyung_ ’s fringe, was in preparation for this moment. 

“Baby, _you’re doing good,_ so fucking good.” 

Sweat mingles between their bodies, intertwining rivulets that snake between the rise and fall of their trembling muscles as Aron feels his release being teased beyond the limits of his control. 

“ _Hyung, hyung, I wanna come, I’m gonna..”_

“ _Fuck_ , pretty baby come for me. Don’t hold back I want you,” 

It doesn’t matter which language rolls off Aron’s tongue when Dongho is this far gone. English, korean, it all becomes gibberish, meaningless words voiced in Aron’s soft purr and made reality in his relentless thrusts ramming apart Dongho’s flexing walls. Dongho’s insides are already soaked with rounds of lube that oozes between his spread cheeks and slicks Aron’s cock tip to base. 

“ _Hyung-”_ Dongho jerks uncontrollably under Aron’s weight and between his _hyung’s_ hot hands. His entire body floods free, sweat and screams and come as Aron fucks him far past his orgasm in a rush to find his own. 

“ _Hyung please slow down please,”_ Dongho’s knuckles are as white as the sheets he fists. 

The high squeak snapping off the end of the last syllable is what catches Aron’s attention, more than the heavy breathing or the tense fingers digging into his back. 

That’s the note that takes Aron over the edge, “ _fuck, fuck Dongho baby_ baby _fuck I’m coming I’m coming_ ” and all the tension in him releases, muscles taut and veins in his arms straining. All the pleasure drains out of Aron’s body and oozes into Dongho’s spasming heat, forever greedy for more even when they’re so exhausted they can do no more than melt into one another. Aron catches his breath, loses it when Dongho’s doe eyes flutter open and his thick thighs loosen their hold on his hips. Aron stays where he is, soaking in their kisses, sweat, shared warmth.

“ _Hyung…”_

_“_ What’s up, cutie baby _?”_

Dongho beams. It’s as toe-curling as the first time - the moment Aron knew he was smitten with this _dongsaeng,_ no more frightening than a harmless puppy, and just as eager for his _hyung’s_ direction and praise.

“ _Nothin’_ .” Dongho settles against the pillow, craning his neck up for another kiss as Aron buries his face in the juncture between clavicle and jaw. “ _I just wanted to say it.”_

"Baby?”

“ _Yeah?”_

“Nothing,” Aron chuckles, grabbing for the covers to hide them both in case his roommate decided to come back early and ignored all his warning texts. “ _I_ _‘m glad I came.”_

He means Seoul, the city where he found himself and love.

But he realises he must have used the wrong phrasing, because Dongho’s pitchy giggle makes the bed shake.

“ _Hyung, you’re so gross.”_

Instead of explaining, Aron shrugs it off and kisses Dongho until they’re both laughing, yawning, sighing.

He doesn’t see a point in correcting Dongho’s thoughts when both meanings were true, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> comments/kudos mean the world to me, so anything you want to give i appreciate. tysm for reading (:


End file.
